I'm new to how Ubuntu works and installed it yesterday alongside Windows 7, but in doing so I have created a few problems. I have partitions for Windows, Ubuntu, System Recovery, and storage for all my files with the intention to access them on either OS, but I don't even see all of my drives listed on Home Folder. Not to mention that during the Ubuntu instillation I managed to screw up any chance of booting to the Windows side of things at all. I'll fix Windows once I get my hands on a copy in a couple days, but in the mean time any suggestions for accessing my files?

If you need me to find any data about my computer to help you figure out what's wrong with it, please don't hesitate to tell me what I need to show you. Thanks

2 Answers
2

Ubuntu supports Windows File Systems by default and you should be able to access them out of the box. What do you see when you open the file manager? There should be a list of your Windows partitions of the left side of the file manager.

If you don't see anything, please click the Ubuntu button on the top-left of the screen. In the Dash, search for "disk" and click on the disk utility application. In here you are able to see your hard disk and partitions. Are they showing up in here?

They should all be already present on your system but it doesn't hurt to check again. Also make sure you have installed 'gvfs' metapackage:

sudo apt-get install gvfs*

Reboot your computer, and if you are still unable to access your NTFS partitions, you can try to manually mount them as follows.

First you have to create a new directory in your /media folder. '/' is the standard symbol for 'file system' directory. Inside the file system directory, there is a folder named 'media'. This is where you will mount your NTFS partitions, after you create a new directory inside this /media folder. You can name this new directory 'hdd'. To do that, run this command in a terminal:

sudo mkdir /media/hdd

Insert your password when prompted for it and you're done.

Next, you can mount one or more partitions in /media/hdd by typing in a terminal some codes similar to this one:

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/hdd

or this one:

sudo mount /dev/sda5 /media/hdd

To find out which one is which, use the disk utility application as suggested by user Gladen in the previous post.